"I wonder what percent of people ever actually encounter a work of art that changes them" with Manohla Dargis | The Movie Racket

Michael Phillips (0:15)

Well, well, here you are, checking out The Movie Racket, hosted by, let's see, ah, me. Each week in this inaugural season, we're calling The Laws of Motion Pictures an extraordinarily special guest and I talk about a single piece of Hollywood wisdom or stupidity, a filmmaker's declaration of principles, maybe a snappy, sometimes legendary quip with a weirdly long half-life. And then we turn it inside out and see what it provokes in our own feelings about the movies and this eternally collapsing and reforming industry that somehow, either inside the remnants of the studio system or more independently, manages to deliver the occasional masterwork. Miraculously, Stanley Kubrick forged relationships within the studio system while maintaining a remarkable degree of creative control over his methodical, fastidiously detailed visions of worlds without pity but at their most inspired, full of hypnotic beauty and images we couldn't forget if we tried to.

Five of his thirteen features, the final five, in fact, A Clockwork Orange in 1971 through Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, came out under the Warner Brothers banner. One of those five was Barry Lyndon, which was released in 1975 This was Kubrick's adaptation of the 19th century Thackeray novel. The filmmaker told the French critic, editor and author Michel Simond that for Kubrick, the cinema had no business trying to change the world or even change a viewer's mind about anything, really. Joining me for this week's show, Manohla Dargis. She's the chief film critic of the New York Times. As I found out after we lined her up for our conversation, she placed Barry Lyndon on her 10 greatest of all time list for sight and sound. We talk about movies that did, in fact, change our worldviews, at least on cinema, and our sense of what the movies could be in our childhood and adolescence. For Manohla, it was a Godard film, and for me, it was a Kubrick film actually. So, let's go.

Well, Manohla Dargis, it's wonderful to have you on this thing we call The Movie Racket. Thanks for jumping on.

Manohla Dargis (2:40)

Thank you for having me, Michael. It's a real pleasure.

Michael Phillips (2:43)

It's been too long since we've kind of met up in person, but I've been lucky enough to run into you here and there on the festival circuit and you are now the chief film critic for the New York Times, co-chief for many years and before that, LA Weekly and the LA Times and the Village Voice.

You're just one of the greats. So, I'm happy to yak with you about this thing that Stanley Kubrick said, which was in an interview around the time of Barry Lyndon, 1975, with the French critic, Michel Simond. And they were talking about whether or not the impact of his work, did he think about sort of the larger impact on audiences? And he sort of dismissed that, just out of hand. And he said, I wonder what percent of people ever actually encounter a work of art that changes them, changes the view they have. And he kind of laughs. There's like laughs in parentheses in the original interview, dismissively or something. He says, yeah, maybe if they're 15 or 16 years old. But he really didn't buy it. Do you buy what he's saying? I mean, he was not putting on an act, I think. But what's your feeling when you hear that based on what you think of Kubrick's work? I wonder.

Manohla Dargis (3:53)

Well, given that he's dead, I guess we can talk smack about him. I mean, I love Kubrick's work. I never met the man. But I think that the framing of the question is odd to me, or it's certainly not applicable to me. But some of the people who I've talked to about, like my husband and other people who, when we do talk about art, I think that there are certainly works of art that have that kind of lightning effect. That's like you hear about the right spring, right?

People were rioting after listening to it.

Whether that's true or not, I mean, there's a lot of myths that sometimes involved with how certain works are received, and certain avant-garde works, certain works of high modernism. For me, it's weird, Michael, because I think it's a funny question, particularly for movie people, because movie people, I think, have a different relationship to the object. We're not civilians. We watch many, many, many more movies in a given year. We probably watch more movies in a given year than most people watch in a lifetime. We know most Americans are watching in theater, certainly one movie, maybe a couple of year. I watch hundreds of movies a year. I grew up in New York City, and my parents were really broke, but they were also avid moviegoers. They brought me to movies when I was a kid, and I was a really well-behaved child. I mean, that all changed, of course, later. But there's a part of our family lore that they took me to see the Vincent Minnelli movie, Lust for Life, starring Kirk Douglas as Vincent Van Gogh. That when he cuts off his ear, I started crying apparently in the movie theater. Now, I was a toddler.